Once a year, Reuters Institute collects data worldwide on how people consume digital news as part of its Reuters Institute Digital News Report. What is striking is that news fatigue, but also news avoidance, is continuing to increase globally. Media researcher Julia Behre can confirm this. She is the co-author of German country report of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report from the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research, Hans-Bredow-Institute. Another point that Julia Behre was able to determine from the data is that general interest in news has declined. According to Behre, this is already an indicator of news fatigue. News avoidance in Germany has also risen from 69 percent to 78 percent in the 18-24 age group – those who avoid the news at least occasionally – compared to the previous year. Behre says, Germany is not an isolated case, but rather part of a global trend.  

The German country report of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report (GDNR) also breaks down the platforms people use to consume news. While older people tend to get their news from television or the internet, younger people are increasingly consuming news via social media. In the 2025 GDNR, one platform clearly dominates the 18-24 age group: Instagram.

Due to its structure, Instagram as a platform can exacerbate news fatigue in addition to the actual news. The exact effects will be explained in more detail in the following section. 

In addition to the different uses of platforms and age groups, there is also a fundamental difference between news fatigue and news avoidance. Behre emphasizes that news fatigue is a cognitive attitude – in other words, a state in which people feel tired of news and information. News avoidance goes beyond this because it is an actual behavioral change: news is avoided intentionally or unintentionally.

Julia Behre also points out that there is active news avoidance, whereby certain topics or keywords are avoided, such as wars, crises, or even news about particular public figures like Donald Trump. However, news is often simply avoided because it puts people in a bad mood. According to Behre, citing the GDNR 2025, 43 percent of respondents in the younger target group (18 to 24-year-olds) said they were exhausted by the amount of news. Nineteen percent of these respondents avoided the news because they couldn't relate the information to their lives – and 10 percent avoided the news because they couldn't understand or contextualize it.

“News fatigue is a state of system overload,” says Michael Rasimus, head of the eye-tracking laboratory at DHBW Karlsruhe.  Essentially, it’s about the fact that people have to constantly classify and process information input, while new content flashes across social media displays every second. This is, of course, a contradiction in terms.

According to Rasimus, it is also important to note that it is not only the content of the news that affects people, but above all: keywords, images, notification sounds, and push-messages. This constant, redundant input, together with the news, can be overwhelming – especially on Instagram, for example. One possible reaction is withdrawal and avoidance of the news, or a digital detox. Others, on the other hand, seek even more information so that they can sort through the initial stimulus – but this could end in “doomscrolling,” says Michael Rasimus.

Cognitive and emotional exhaustion go hand in hand with news fatigue and news avoidance. This is also the conclusion of a study conducted in 2021, in which participants from Austria, Finland, Japan, Israel, and the US were asked about their news consumption. It is striking that participants from Japan showed less news fatigue than those from the US, and for different reasons. In the US, coverage of Donald Trump and his administration was the main reason for higher news fatigue. In Japan, however, respondents cited other reasons for their news fatigue, such as a lower interest in politics or their attitude toward conflicts arising from news. According to the study, this leads to less cognitive and emotional exhaustion from news in Japan.

According to Michael Rasimus, another important factor contributing to news fatigue is our own emotional state: anything that arouses emotions, constant repetition, or familiar stimuli, such as the constant news coverage of the US president, fuel news fatigue. Attention is primarily focused on content that triggers negative emotions because these are declared as dangerous by the brain. This in turn makes it more difficult for neutral or positive news to get attention. In addition, there is the architecture of social media, which aims to flood our feeds with the same type of news over and over again through learned algorithms and interaction, according to Rasimus.

For some, the most obvious way out of this misery would be digital detox, which involves actively avoiding news. 

However, Michael Rasimus sees this as only a partial solution: although this technique can help in certain cases, it creates a new uncertainty due to a lack of information – and a democratic society thrives on informed citizens, says the expert in media perception psychology.

News fatigue and news avoidance appear to be primarily structural phenomena with two main problems: too much news and too fast news. Michael Rasimus has come up with an approach to counteract this, which could at least be effective on a personal level to avoid news fatigue: ideally, consume less tabloid and clickbait news and instead gather more quality media and background information, says Rasimus. 

This is where Stephan Weichert comes in. He is a media scientist and has been head of the independent VOCER Institute for Digital Resilience since 2020. When asked how he would build a format to curb news fatigue, he says that for him, the most important thing would be to slow down the pace and provide more context in the news. According to Weichert, bundling would also be an option: "Fewer individual reports, but regular situation reports, explanatory updates, and clear signals of resilience. We in the media must always tell people why they should know something".

There are already developments in journalism, such as constructive journalism. However, according to Weichert, this has a problem that has to do with the journalistic self-image, including always wanting to paint as holistic a picture of the news situation as possible and deliberately complicating narratives. Therefore, Weichert's point of reference is less constructive journalism and more solutions journalism, which specifically consists of context, complexity, and control. 

One example of solutions journalism is the Transitions magazine from Prague. It publishes articles that explain the problem and directly link it to a solution. Like in this article, which deals with air pollution in Albania, Italy, and the Netherlands and explains solutions in the form of technological developments and counter-movements.

Weichert emphasizes that slow journalism and solutions journalism could alleviate news fatigue, but only as long as they do not create expectations of positive solutions that would be journalistically untenable. 

There are answers to the key questions “Why does news fatigue lead to avoidance – and how can journalism counteract this?”. These answers primarily shed light on how news fatigue and news avoidance arise. However, it is not yet entirely clear how journalism can counteract this. Nevertheless, the approaches of slow journalism, constructive journalism, and solution journalism offer interesting approaches. In German-speaking countries, the magazine Krautreporter is best known for its constructive journalism, which contrasts with conventional journalism. On their homepage, Krautreporter has written the following on their banner: "Media that exaggerate conflicts frustrate us. So do journalists who criticize others without the intention of improving things. We empathically seek common ground without ignoring differences. When we write about problems, we also confidently seek solutions.". This contrasts with conventional media in Germany, which largely reports on current events, is financed by advertising and subscriptions, and almost exclusively publishes news without providing constructive analysis. Krautreporter, on the other hand, is a cooperative financed by membership fees, which in turn gives members influence over the cooperative.

One alternative, as mentioned in the previous section, is the English-language magazine Transitions from Czechia, which publishes a mixture of constructive and solution journalism. Nevertheless, all forms of journalism outside the conventional sphere remain rather marginal, although they are slowly managing to slip more into the focus of news consumers.